Jan 04, 2013 (The Hartford Courant - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
EAST HARTFORD -- A man who was arrested recently on a voyeurism charge admitted that he has secretly videotaped women in restrooms at work and at his church in Glastonbury for the past several years, police said.

Darrel Lewis, 32, of East Hartford, told police he had recorded females as young as 11, according to an arrest warrant affidavit obtained Friday. Lewis was being held on $250,000 bail on a single charge of voyeurism for an appearance Feb. 1 in Manchester Superior Court. Police say their investigation is continuing.

Lewis was arrested Dec. 27 at Hydro Honing Laboratories in East Hartford, where he worked as an engineer. A 19-year-old female coworker had noticed a video camera hidden between rolls of toilet paper on a shelf directly across from the toilet, police said. She brought it to a manager while it was still in "record" mode, and police were called.

Confronted about the camera, Lewis admitted he planted it in the women's restroom that afternoon, police said. Police say Lewis then gave a statement detailing his careful methods of recording, editing and categorizing the surreptitious videos he had recorded at several locations.

Lewis, who lives with his mother and sister, told police he started sneak-videotaping about three or four years ago at a Tim Hortons restaurant in Rocky Hill where he worked. Lewis said he placed a video camera in the women's bathroom pointed toward an area where employees changed their clothes. He recorded about six videos, but then erased them "because I knew it was wrong and did not want to continue to do it anymore," according to the arrest warrant affidavit.

But in the winter of 2009, Lewis said, he resumed his secret filiming, this time at two bathrooms at the church he attended, Faith Family Church in Glastonbury. Lewis admitted that some recordings at the church captured an 11-year-old girl, the affidavit said. He had had not targeted the girl and insisted he was not a pedophile, police said, but kept the videos anyway.

Lewis said he also had planted a video camera at a friend's house in East Hartford to capture his friend's sister using the bathroom, according to the warrant.

Lewis uploaded the videos to a home computer, edited them and categorized the videos by the subjects' names and nicknames, the affidavit states. Police obtained a warrant to search Lewis's home and seized two desktop computers, a laptop, a hard drive storage unit and a flash drive.